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Signal Virtue: Mirror of God’s Majesty

Describe an experience: Please write a short story (approximately 1,000 characters) about a time in your life when this positive trait or virtue contributed to or created a situation that had a positive impact on your life.

I’d like to think that I do this all the time. It is my job, after all. To create conversations with my students and carry them to a higher level. But I am having a hard time thinking of particular instances.

It is like having to describe a particular fencing bout rather than the set of all fencing bouts. Some touches stand out, some bouts stand out, but only because I have fenced so many. Every individual bout is in some way the sum of every bout I have ever fenced, the bout of the moment a synecdoche for the set of all.

There was a moment in class on Wednesday when the students were talking about canons and how they work, and I showed them this graphic of the cross-references in Scripture.

As Professor Peterson likes to explain, the Bible is not a single work, but a set of works, a library of books compiled by generations over centuries, written and rewritten in reference to itself. But the books now included in the Scriptures are not the only works that refer to these stories, nor is there such a thing as a single canon of Scripture. Protestant Bibles omit certain books that Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include, and Jewish Bibles do not, of course, include the New Testament. And as every fan of Dan Brown knows, there were other texts that never made it in, even in antiquity.

The students made various arguments about why you might make such distinctions between the proper stories and the accretions. One argued: “You might want to purify the stories, get back to their original telling.” To which I responded: ”You’ve just re-invented the Reformation.” Another suggested: “You need to be able to make a list of which stories belong.” To which I rejoined: “And you’ve just re-invented the Council of Trent.”

What began as a conversation about fan fiction and the desire to be inside the beloved story ended as a demonstration of the problem of constructing tradition and faith.

Alternative outcome: Write a short paragraph about what you might have done differently in that situation, so that it might have turned out even better.

Listening. I need to practice listening. I did better on Wednesday than I have done in other classes this quarter, but I know it is something I need to work on.

When the students say something that I like and that I think can move the conversation along productively, I try to reinforce it by interrupting them and marking what they’ve said so that the other students hear it, but this technique can backfire. I let them continue after I interrupt, but it can jar.

I would say that it is easier when I am speaking one-on-one with a student, but I have the same tendency to get excited when I hear something that I think is particularly good. My technique when students come to talk with me about their papers is to get them to tell me what they think they would like to write about. If I let them talk long enough, almost invariably they solve the problem themselves, to which I respond: “See, you already know what you want to write!” But it is hard for me to leave it there, for them to wrestle with. I like to try to tell them why what they have said is so exciting to me.

I have a harder time with colleagues. We have a fairly brutal campus culture at Chicago. Visitors to our workshops often remark how the conversations that they have with us about their papers are more demanding than any they have experienced elsewhere. We push and we push and we push to get each other to clarify our arguments, which can be unsettling at the best of times. I myself do not tend to take it well when I feel like colleagues and students are making suggestions at odds with my own thinking. I like being in charge of the conversation. There, I said it!

But in truth it is rare for someone to suggest something that I have not thought of, at least if we are talking about my own research. It happens more often in class with my undergraduates, that the conversation gets to a level I had not planned.

Guidelines for general improvement: Now that you've thought about how you might have improved things even more for yourself or others in that particular situation, please think about this virtue in more general terms. How could you work on capitalizing on this positive trait in general, so that you or others that you care about benefit as much as possible?

I want to find more people to talk with about the things that I have been studying. About mythology and devotion and the ways in which people use stories to give purpose to their lives.

I worry that I am missing conversations that others are having, but other than Professor Peterson, I have not found colleagues who seem to be thinking in these terms. Some of it is serendipity, I know. You need to frame the question, then the answers will come. But how is it that I can find so many students who share my interests and so few colleagues?

Professor Peterson has talked about how these kinds of conversations tend to work only down the dominance hierarchy, less often laterally or up. Which is to say: my students will listen to me and help me move the conversation to a higher level, but it is harder for my academic superiors or peers.

Do I have peers whom I find it hard to listen to? (I’ll wait, I’m sure that was painful if the coffee was hot.) Of course we are in competition with each other. Of course we want to claw our way up the dominance hierarchy where, according to the Pareto distribution, there are only a very few places at the top. But what happens when you get to the top and there is no one to talk to?

I spend a lot of time talking to God. Heh. No false humility here! But I do. My blog is an exercise in talking with God, an ongoing prayer to be wielded by God. I also talk all the time with the authors whom I read, constantly pushing myself to learn more, think more deeply about why they have posed the questions that they have. I want to be part of their story, to find myself in the same story with Tolkien and Lewis and Augustine and Rupert of Deutz. I want to be cross-referenced into their lives.

I am finding it difficult to stay cheerful of late. I could blame the hot flashes, which have been wearing me down for the past several months, but it isn’t just the hot flashes.

It is the whole wretched culture war that—human nature being what it is—we are never going to win.

It is the relentless pressure in academia to conform to the prevailing narrative of victimization and oppression that would cast one group as demons (white males, especially Christians) and the other as innocent (everyone else).

It is the unwillingness on the part of establishment conservatives to credit what Milo has shown are the stakes in our fight against the death of our Western ideals.

It is the feeling of being muffled and silenced for speaking out against the mischaracterization of my own field of medieval studies as riven with white supremacism and neglect of the Other.

It is the disappointment in not being able to do more to make a difference in the way in which the argument goes.

I know from the Facebook groups I belong to that many of his followers take Jordan as a kind of spiritual advisor, some would say guru. They spend thread after thread discussing how to live out his sayings.

Which would be fine.

If not for the fact that some of his sayings go directly contrary to the tradition in which he purports to be speaking.

I know, I fell for it, too. In Jordan’s powerful words:
Don’t underestimate the power of your speech! Now, Western culture is phallogocentric. Let’s say it... It is predicated on the idea of the Logos. The Logos is the sacred element of Western culture. What do…

The tenor is smug self-righteousness, the absolute certainty of being on the Right Side of History. Even some liberals are starting to find it a bit hard to take, the way in which their family and friends talk about Those People. The Deplorables. The Racists. The Misogynists. The Xenophobes. The People With the Wrong Opinions about Immigration, the Relation Between the Sexes, the Welfare State, and Islam. You know. The ones who read Breitbart, vote for Donald Trump, and listen to Milo.

It can get a bit wearing, even at a distance. It takes real stamina to be able to meet it head on, as Milo has done this past semester over the course of his Dangerous Faggot Tour. Quite frankly, I don't know how he does it. I get weary just watchingthe protests. The name-calling. The unwillingness to listen to what he actually says. On the other hand, the tactics rarely change, which makes them possible to list. And if we can list them, we can prepare for them. These are the weapons that our oppone…

Feminism is cancer because it is built on a lie. Actually, it is built on a whole pyramid of lies, but there is one gigantic one at its base.

Here it is in its most diabolical form. The author is Ludwig Feuerbach, his translator the novelist George Eliot, the work his Essence of Christianity, published in English in 1854:
But here it is also essential to observe, and this phenomenon is an extremely remarkable one, characterising the very core of religion, that in proportion as the divine subject is in reality human, the greater is the apparent difference between God and man; that is, the more, by reflection on religion, by theology, is the identity of the divine and human denied, and the human, considered as such, is depreciated.... To enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all, man must be nothing....
The monks made a vow of chastity to God; they mortified the sexual passion in themselves, but therefore they had in heaven, in the Virgin Mary, the image of woman—an image of…

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“You grasp my soul, and topple my enemies with it. And what is our soul? A splendid weapon it may be, long, sharp, oiled, and coruscating with the light of wisdom as it is brandished. But what is this soul of ours worth, what is it capable of, unless God holds it and fights with it? Any sword, however beautifully made, lies idle if there is no warrior to take it up.... So God does whatever he wishes with our soul. Since it is in his hand, it is his to use as he will." -- Augustine of Hippo, Exposition of Psalm 34 (35),trans. Maria Boulding, O.S.B.

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“The best way to pray is: stop. Let prayer pray within you whether you know it or not. This means a deep awareness of your true inner identity.... By grace we are Christ. Our relationship with God is that of Christ to the Father in the Holy Spirit." -- Father Louis, alias Thomas Merton